[Update 8/31/2018: Chris Roberts made an update to a post on the RSI forums indicating that you no longer have to pay to watch the livestream of CitizonCon. If you have a Star Citizen account you can watch the event.]
This week’s episode of Around the Verse for Star Citizen is a little bit longer than the last few weeks. It clocks in at 13 and a half minutes, which is about four to five minutes longer than the last few episodes. As usual it covers the development progress being made on Star Citizen, and what lays ahead for the next quarterly update.
The episode starts with another community video featuring a space convoy. There’s another short clip featuring a look at another community-made race across the Staten system in Starfarers.
The team is also working more on refining the scramble races in preparation for the next major milestone update. This includes improving the combat for the hover vehicles, where players will be able to attack other ground racers and steal their points during the scramble race.
The standard scramble race includes hitting each checkpoint, while the updated version of the scramble race will mean that players who aren’t as good at turning and twisting through the race tracks will be able to blast their opponents into pieces to take their points instead.
The Lorville cityscape is still being developed and is quite a ways off from completion, but the downtown and the industrial districts are currently coming along. The outer wall of Lorville is looking good, though, and it has this kind of Mega City One feel to it from 2000AD’s Judge Dredd, which should really help give a distinctive look to the planet.
One of the more impressive topics covered in this week’s episode is the new culling optimization features for the next 3.3.0 update. The container streaming makes it so that there is streamlined loading of certain sections of certain objects. So for the Idris they gave the example of how they’ll be culling out anything outside of the player’s view during the actual runtime. They’re also improving the culling so that instead of it being based around rectangular sections of the ship, it will now be based around angular sections of the ship.
The significance of this is that it makes it easier for the artists to modify the LOD and make modifications for optimization compared to the older culling method. This means that streamlined loading will be more fluent, will be smoother, and will be more visually consistent.
The new geometric culling will be available both for the persistent universe and for Squadron 42.
You can keep track of the development of the game or check out what major updates are planned for the upcoming 3.3.0 roll out by visiting the official website.
Oh yeah, and tickets are on sale for CitizenCon. This week’s episode of ATV managed to get downvoted quite a bit when the Citizens learned that the digital streaming version of CitizenCon would have premium tickets.
Even some of the more die hard fans were displeased with the news, resulting in some of them, such as YouTuber chiffmonkey, putting together a video expressing his disappointment with the fact that you have to pay to watch CitizenCon.
I don’t know how RSI plans on dealing with that in the future, but the backers weren’t too keen on the price tag for the streaming version of the event.
